City Builder wrote://Oh and my apologies to everybody's eyes. I have been accused by many and do realize that I am far too verbose in my writing at times. I just hardly ever can only put down in one or two sentences what it is that I am thinking. My apologies for any walls of text that I might or already have written.

The thread is intended to be a relatively in-depth discussion - it's a complicated topic. I may get as far as screen shots at some point...

Anyhow, my point was that I'm very pleased to read what you think - there's nothing to apologise for. At least you (1) can spell, (2) can punctuate and (3) break your text into paragraphs.

(edit) That was in no way meant to seem patronising, rather to say that I for one appreciate intelligent discussion.

This is a city I built during Planet Offer. It's a little hard to see so zoomed out but I have double expressways going around the edge of the resiential areas and CBD. I designed the city so that, if you wanted to get from one side to the other in a hurry you could simply get onto an expressway and circumvent the busy areas in the middle.

Instead, all the traffic tries to drive through a couple of small avenues across two bridges (these are one way small avenues side by side) while the expressways stay almost untouched. I can't say how irritating it is to watch cars spend over 5 minutes at intersections before they can start moving, and every time they just refuse to use the outer roads.

I reckon they're simply picking the shortest, most direct route from A-B regardless of road capacity. If they were smarter they could take the express ways and bypass about 90% of the intersections they currently cross.

Maybe I just built my city the wrong way? It's possible. I do think traffic doesn't consider all the time spent stopped at traffic lights when picking the 'fastest' route however. So, they decide the straight line through the CBD is best, but it has over 6x more intersections than the expressway has. In the end if you used the expressway you would actually travel a longer route, but get to your destination much, much sooner because you're not waiting 3 minutes every intersection for some lights to turn green. Is there anything to be said for that? This is only my opinion.

Ok.Well my first reason is how they leave from there house (you can see the person actually walking into the car) and arrive back at there house (getting out and going into there house) In sim city, you simply saw them leave with a car, fade into a road, and never come back.Second of all, i find that as the traffic grows as the population grows, the variaty of cars also increases as you build more wealth types, as it would in real life.Third, The bus network is a great way to organize and decrease the traffic congestion on roads, most in real life cities.Ill come up with more later, i just woke up

I guess you could say then that the traffic system in CXL to you is mostly enjoyed for it's eye candy? There is nothing wrong with that at all. I too enjoy that I can see the different cars, though I'd like to see more different cars since I see too many of the red compact and the blue VW mini bus on my streets.

But do you enjoy the mechanics of the traffic system?

Please note, I'm not calling anybody out, I'm just curious if people enjoy the mechanics of how the AI goes on it's routes, it seems to me to be the weakest link of the traffic system, having the AI not take into account the amount of intersections along a route, or to figure out that taking the express road that has no intersections along the route will get them there in a fraction of the time even though they have to drive an extra 2 small blocks to get to the enterance of it..

I think one of the large oversights is that MC programmed the game to allow us to travel along with the cars in the game and I do it quite often (by clicking on a car you can travel with it, and even get down low like you are looking out the windscreen), but sometimes I will come to an intersection, the car that I am following will pull out into the intersection and then disappear and I'll be left sitting there no longer moving. I zoom out to see where the person might have gone to, and find that there are no buildings around at all that they might have ducked into, thus the 'fluff' cars of Cities XL. It would be better if when a car is clicked on, it then has a place that it needs to go in the city where there are buildings, reroute it so that if it was a fluff car it is now a car with a purpose so that it does not just vanish out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe 2012 might see better traffic patterning and things like this I hope. But I don't hold my breath as if it was so easy to do, then I imagine all the other CB games that I play that have traffic would have already have done it.

Last edited by City Builder on 11 October 2010, 13:53, edited 1 time in total.

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I just checked out a house in one of my small towns to see where it goes, by clicking on it, it shows me the route that the peeps take to their work.

I experimented by building it a shorter route between it's house and where it goes to work, the traffic pattern stayed the same for that house, lending me to believe that perhaps they don't even take the shortest distance from A to B but rather some random route maybe, or some routing that only MC knows about.

In the screenshot, the red line is the original route that the house takes, I added a road to make the trip shorter for them, but they did not change the route no matter how long I ran the simulation on high speed, it remained the same.

Red route is the route that the game had chosen, the blue route is how I would have gone if I were driving the vehicle in the game as I added the new road to cut over to the avenue. Green arrow is new road I put to make the route shorter in distance.

trafficroute1.jpg (151.78 KiB) Viewed 2571 times

Cities XL 2012: Just a hope that if sales are good to Focus, they will continue the line of CXL and produce a 2012 version sometime with a massive upgrade of current features, fixes, and introduce many new wonderful features. Nothing has been announced, since they are concentrating just on getting 2011 out the door at this point.

Note to Winter Dragon, very nice eye, I love this kind of city building that I have seen, dragons, faces, eyes now. Very beautiful work. One day maybe you should do a tutorial how you do it so well.

All posts on this forum from me are mine, and do NOT represent Focus Home Interactive unless stated otherwise.EX-Moderator of Cities XL forums

WHEN YOU ARE TIRED OF GAMES OF DESTRUCTION - Visit CITY BUILDER GAMESFOR GAMES OF CONSTRUCTION.

They do not take the shortest way, the took the fastest. The game engine is my evidence They alway take the fastest route and the fastest is choosen by this aspects:

How fast can they travel? Bigger streets have higher max speed than little. So if you build a 40x10 road byside a expressway and the traffic on both is the same, the citizens will always take the expressway.How high is the traffic density? People will avoid travelling on streets where the traffic is high.And than the engine also count in the lenght of the street. There is some complicated formula for that, maybe I'll find it in the deeps of the CXL data files.

And my personal experience is, that the people always use my big "bypass" routes, and they also use the direct routes. I made the experience, that my mainstreets are used by as much cars as all the other streets. e.g.: When one mainroute is yellow in my city, it's often so that all the others are yellow too.